The Leper

Note: This character requires more costuming care and possible facial prosthetics.

You are cursed to never feel pain. Some might see this as a blessing, but it has only caused you suffering. From a young age you injured yourself without realising it - especially when fire was involved. You wouldn't remove your hand from a burning stove in time; you don't think to bend your legs properly after a jump; you wouldn't notice the cold. By now you are disfigured and scarred. Other people treat you as if you are diseased, and you have led a harsh existence. Worse, now vampires exist and they seem to gain immense bodily resilience from drinking your blood, a gift to them that you are afforded no part in.

Long Description: Your incredible resistance to pain has left you with sloughed skin, leisures and breaks, badly fixed injuries and terrible scars. It’s like your body doesn’t care. There’s a warning or alarm in everyone else that you don’t possess. The thickened air of a room might have woken you, but the fire did not. The fortune of feeling pain is a matter people discredit.

It would make more sense if you didn’t have physical sensation. Thing is, you do. You can feel things, but they’re so background and remote that they can mostly be ignored. Many sensations are muted - although pain is entirely absent. You don’t feel pressure and temperature in the same way, you also might have to chase the highs of pleasure more than anyone else just to feel it, and gain anything pleasurable out of it.

People have shouted at you to move, to lift your hand, to duck your head, to get off the broken glass. What they witness when you look down or look up or step back - all with a belated expression of concern you have to paste on these days - leaves them stunned for a moment, spared of speech. Because whatever reaction they’re expecting of you to justify theirs - someone has crossed a fast moving creek once, when you couldn’t hear them - isn’t the reaction they get. At first they’re worried, then confused, before an indignant anger sets in. Why aren’t you being more careful?

Thing is, no matter how much damage you take, you don’t die. Bells, finality, ring in you but there is no boat that comes to the dock, no onward voyage, no farewell to your essence.

People underestimate how much the world changes when you’re ugly. Even ugly people can make themselves beautiful if given proper nourishment and care, and perhaps dyes and pots and potions, like the men use on the stage, faces dolled up and shining in the bucking light. Only the truly horrific can be ugly all the time, to everybody. 

You wish people would ignore you. They point and put hands to their mouths. Children - the bolder ones, after they pluck up the courage - rush forward and kick at your legs, they make a game of it amongst their peers. You’ve been spat on, thrown around, mocked, belittled, and - unless you inject the precisely correct amount of pain and horror - much worse. Worse with some men, what they like to do; others quit once they get no reaction. But some don’t.

You keep your eyes closed. Arms shivering between swallows, some sort of blood noise in your ears, you keep your eyes closed. You can veer off from yourself if you try hard enough. You can all but roll up and out of yourself - but never enough, never quite enough to be free.

You flicker like a spirit that cannot - even - depart this world.

Mechanics: If a vampire were to drink your blood, they gain the benefits of two levels of the "discipline" Fortitude for the next hour. (Fortitude is a vampiric power, please see Mechanics page.) If the vampire already possess fortitude, it is raised by two levels. Meanwhile humans that drink your blood gain the benefit of level one fortitude, also for an hour's duration. Anyone who is under the active effect of your blood is resistant to pain.